The Productivity Train Wreck

Ah yes, the classic "let's rewrite decades of legacy code in a few months" fantasy. For those who don't know, COBOL is the programming equivalent of that ancient Nokia phone your grandpa still uses – outdated but somehow keeping entire nations running. Converting tens of millions of lines of COBOL that handle checks notes just the entire Social Security system to Java is like trying to transplant a whale's brain into a dolphin over a weekend. What could possibly go wrong? Just the financial security of every retiree in America. The best part is the "DOGE wants it done in months" bit. Nothing says "I've never written a line of code in my life" quite like thinking you can replace a 60-year-old system that processes trillions of dollars before your Jira subscription expires. Fun fact: The last time someone tried something similar, they spent $100 million and got absolutely nowhere. But hey, this time it'll be different because... reasons.

Oh look, it's the lifecycle of every coding project ever! You start with a simple, elegant snake of code—"I'll just keep this clean and organized." Fast forward two weeks and you've got a writhing ball of tangled pythons that would make Medusa jealous. That "quick feature" your client requested? It just added 17 more snakes to the pit. The best part? You're the one who has to explain in the code review why your elegant solution now resembles a snake orgy gone horribly wrong. But hey, "it works on my machine" so... don't judge me!

DENIED ENTRY TO HEAVEN FOR CRIMES AGAINST HUMANITY: taking more than 5 minutes in daily stand-ups! 💀 St. Peter is LITERALLY keeping receipts at the pearly gates! That 15-minute "quick sync" where you droned on about your JIRA tickets for half an hour? STRAIGHT TO THE UNDERWORLD, SUSAN! Even eternal salvation has its limits, and apparently they're drawn at "just one more thing before we wrap up..."

Ah yes, Brooks' Law in its purest form. The ultimate middle finger to every project manager who thinks throwing more bodies at a late project will somehow speed things up. Been in this industry 15 years and watched countless PMs discover this truth the hard way. For the uninitiated: Fred Brooks wrote "The Mythical Man-Month" in 1975 after watching IBM's OS/360 project implode spectacularly. His insight? Adding people to a late software project makes it later. Why? Because now your original devs are spending all their time onboarding the new folks instead of, you know, actually coding. Next time your boss suggests "let's just add three more developers" to fix that deadline you're about to miss, just silently email them this quote. Then update your resume, because they probably won't get it.

The legendary "one more bug" lie that's older than version control itself. Every developer knows that fixing "just one more bug" is like saying you'll have "just one potato chip." Fast forward 84 years and you're still knee-deep in spaghetti code, wondering where your youth went. The project manager is still optimistically putting "almost done" on the sprint report while the codebase has evolved into its own sentient entity with trust issues.

The classic corporate bait-and-switch! Manager gleefully announces "no more daily standups" like he's bestowing a gift from the heavens, only to reveal the true horror: writing detailed Slack messages every morning instead. The final panels show the developers' brilliant malicious compliance—using ChatGPT to auto-generate those meaningless status updates. This is peak modern workplace evolution: replacing a 15-minute meeting with an hour of typing, then automating away the busywork with AI. The circle of corporate life is complete. The manager thinks he's won, but the devs are playing 4D chess while he's still figuring out how to open Excel.